A young Frenchman, a medical student, Ferdinand Bardamyu, under the influence of propaganda, enlisted as a volunteer in the army. A life begins for him, full of hardships, horror and grueling transitions in Flanders, in the territory of which the French troops take part in the First World War. Once Bardamu sent to intelligence. By this time, he had already managed to reach such a degree of nervous and physical exhaustion that he dreamed of only one thing: to surrender. During a sortie, he meets another French soldier, Leon Robinson, whose wishes coincide with those of Bardamou. However, they fail to surrender, and they diverge each in their own direction.

Soon Bardamuu is injured, and for treatment he is sent to Paris. There he meets an American Lola, dressed in uniform and arriving in Paris, to the extent of his weak strengths, "save France." Her responsibilities include regular sampling of apple fritters for Parisian hospitals. Lola spent all day tormenting Bardam with talk of soul and patriotism. When he confesses to her that he is afraid to go to war and has a nervous breakdown, she abandons him, and Bardamu ends up in a hospital for crazy soldiers. A little later, he begins to meet with Musin, a violinist, a special, not too strict morality, which arouses strong feelings in him, but more than once betrays him with richer clients, in particular with wealthy foreigners. Soon, Musin prefers that their paths with Bardamu and completely diverged.

Bardamu does not have cash, and he goes to one jeweler, who worked in the back room before the war, to ask for money. He does this with his former friend Voyarez, who also once worked for this jeweler. From him, young people receive pennies, which they would not have enough for one day. Then, at the suggestion of Vouarez, both go to the mother of the deceased fellow soldier Vouarez, who is a wealthy woman and occasionally lends Vouarez money. In the courtyard of her house, young people meet the same Leon Robinson. Robinson tells them that the woman they came to commit suicide in the morning. This fact upsets him no less than Bardamu, since he is her godson and also wanted to ask for a certain amount.

A few months later, Bardamoux, who was exempted from military service, boarded a ship and sailed to the shores of Africa, where he hoped to get back on his feet in one of the French colonies. This crossing almost cost him his life. For unknown reasons, passengers turn Bardam into an outcast on a ship and intend to throw the young man overboard three days before the end of the voyage. Only the miracle and eloquence of Bardamu help him stay alive.

During a stop at the Bambol-Brahamans colony at night, Ferdinan Bardamyu, taking advantage of the fact that his pursuers need a break, disappears from the ship. He gets a job at Sranodan Small Congo. His responsibilities include life in the forest, ten days' journey from Fort Gono, the town where the company’s office is located, and the exchange of rubber mined by blacks for rags and trinkets that the company supplied to his predecessor and for which savages are so greedy. Having reached their destination, Bardamu meets with his predecessor, who again turns out to be Leon Robinson. Robinson takes with him all the most valuable, most of the money and leaves in an unknown direction, not intending to return to for-Gono and give a report to his superiors in his economic activities. Bardamyu, left with nothing, driven almost to madness by greedy insects and loud night howls of the beast living in the forest around his hut, decides to follow Robinson and move in the direction in which his acquaintance disappeared. Bardamyu is undermined by malaria, and the Negro escorts are forced to deliver him to the nearest settlement, which turns out to be the capital of the Spanish colony, on a stretcher. There he goes to a priest who sells Bardam to the captain of the Infanta Sosalia galley as a rower. The ship is sailing to America. In the United States, Bardamu escapes from the galley and tries to find his place in this country. First, he works as a flea meter in a quarantine hospital, then goes without work and penniless, then he turns to his former mistress, Lola, for help. She gives him a hundred dollars and drives him out the door. Bardamoux takes a job at a Ford factory, but soon drops out, too, having met Molly, an affectionate and devoted girl who helps him financially and wants to marry him someday. God works in mysterious ways; it is not surprising that in America, Ferdinan accidentally meets with Leon Robinson, who sailed into the country in the same way as Bardamu, but slightly ahead of the latter. Robinson works as a cleaner.

After staying in America for about two years, Bardamoux goes back to France and resumes medicine, passes exams, while continuing to earn extra money. After five to six years of academic suffering, Ferdinan still receives a diploma and the right to conduct medical activities. He opens his medical office on the outskirts of Paris, in Garenne-Dranger. He has no complaints, no ambitions, but only a desire to breathe a little more freely. The public in Garenne-Dranger (the name of the area speaks for itself) belongs to the lower strata of society, declassed elements. Here people never live in abundance and do not try to hide the rudeness and unbridled nature of their morals. Bardamyu, as the most unpretentious and conscientious doctor in the quarter, often does not receive a single sou for his services and gives advice for free, not wanting to rob the poor. True, they come across frankly criminal personalities, such as, for example, the husband and wife Prokiss, who first want to put Prokiss's elderly mother in a hospital for mentally ill old people, and when she gives a decisive rebuff to their plans, they plan to kill her. This function, which does not surprise readers anymore, the fourth Prokiss is entrusted to Robinson, who came from nowhere, for a fee of ten thousand francs.

An attempt to send an old woman to the other world ends dramatically for Robinson himself: shot from a shotgun during the installation of a trap for mother Prokiss gets into the eyes of Robinson himself, which makes him blind for several months. The old women and Robinson, the Prokiss spouses, are far from sin, so that the neighbors do not know anything, they are sent to Toulouse, where the old woman opens her own business: she shows tourists the church crypt with the half-decayed mummies displayed in it and has a good income from this. Robinson, on the other hand, makes acquaintance with Madlon, a twenty-year-old black-eyed girl who, in the near future, despite his blindness, plans to become his wife. She reads newspapers to him, walks with him, feeds him and takes care of him.

Bardamoux comes to Toulouse to visit his friend. Things are going well with him, he feels better, his vision is gradually returning to him, he receives a few percent of the profit from the crypt. On the day Bardamoux leaves for Paris with the old Prokiss, misfortune happens: having stumbled on a staircase leading to a crypt, she falls down and dies from a bruise. Ferdinan suspects that Robinson was not involved here, and, not wanting to get involved in this matter, he hurries to return to Paris. In Paris, Bardamu, under the patronage of one of his colleagues, Sukhodrokov, takes a job as an assistant chief physician in a psychiatric hospital. The head physician by the name of Baritone has a little daughter, distinguished by a certain strangeness of character. Her father wants her to start learning English, and she asks Bardam to teach her. The girl does not go well with English, but her father, who is present at all the lessons, is imbued with a passionate love for the language, literature and history of England, which radically changes his view of the world and his life aspirations. He sends his daughter to some distant relative, and he indefinitely leaves for England, then in the Scandinavian countries, leaving Bardamu as his deputy. Soon, Robinson appears at the gates of the hospital, who this time escaped from his bride and her mother. Madlon strenuously dragged Robinson down the aisle, threatening, if he did not marry her, to inform the police that the death of the old woman Prokiss came not without Robinson's participation, Appearing to Bardam, he begs a friend to shelter him in his hospital as insane. Madlon immediately after the groom arrives in Paris, gets a job and spends all his free time at the gates of the hospital park in the hope of seeing Leon. Bardamu, wanting to protect Robinson from meeting with Madlon, speaks rudely to her and even gives a slap in the face. Regretting his incontinence, he invites Robinson and Madlon, as well as massage therapist Sophia, his close friend, for the sake of reconciliation for a walk. Reconciliation, however, does not work, and on the way back to the hospital in a taxi Madlon, who fails to get Robinson to agree to return to Toulouse and marry her, shoots him point-blank with a pistol, and then, opening the taxi door, crawls out from it and, having rolled off a steep slope right through the mud, disappears into the darkness of the field. Robinson dies from injuries to his stomach.